Producer Peter L. Stein on the Making of The Castro

It's hard to pinpoint exactly how and when
this program got its start. Was it in June of 1996, when KQED's cameras
first started to roll tape (it was an AIDS benefit at Josie's Cabaret
and Juice Joint)? Or perhaps it was in May 1992? That's when I first
discussed the idea of a series of programs telling the story of San Francisco
through its neighborhoods, and it quickly became clear to all of us that
the Castro would make a powerful and entertaining episode.

Or was it in 1973, when a 13-year-old kid from the Sunset District had
to spend a lot of after-school hours riding the streetcar home, and got
his first look at the neighborhood that was soon to become the "gay
mecca"? Truth to tell, I didn't notice too much about the Castro
then -- it was just a place to catch the streetcar; but by the time I
moved back to San Francisco as an adult in 1983, six blocks from Castro
Street, the neighborhood had become, it seems irrevocably, a cornerstone
of gay history. That transformation has always intrigued me -- because
I feel a part of both worlds that the Castro defines. As a third-generation
native San Franciscan, I can appreciate what the old "Eureka Valley"
must have meant to its residents; and as a 37-year-old gay man, I have
come to know both the appeal and the problems the Castro presents for
a generation of gay men and lesbians who came of age there.

To tell the dramatic story of the Castro, my associate producer David
Condon and I began by speaking with more than 200 individuals representing
a wide spectrum of experiences in the neighborhood -- from the original
merchants and families of Eureka Valley, to lesbian and gay pioneers who
paved the way for a community to evolve in San Francisco in the '50s,
to those who planted a rainbow flag in the neighborhood in the '70s, to
young queers disaffected from the neighborhood today.

As a storyline emerged, we called upon KQED's viewers (as well as the
remarkable archives of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern
California) to begin piecing together a visual history of the neighborhood;
and shooting and interviewing took place mainly during the summer of 1996
-- more than 70 hours in total. Sometimes we were fortunate in our discoveries:
a visiting out-of-towner happened to catch one of our appeals for footage
on the air, and supplied us with exquisite and poignant home movies of
gay life in San Francisco in the '40s and '50s. And sometimes we lost
out: many of the important storytellers of the Castro, who should by all
rights be around to share their tale, have died in the last 15 years.
AIDS still casts a long shadow over the neighborhood, as inevitably it
must over the documentary -- but I hope that in re-telling the history
of the neighborhood, some of what shines through is the sense of exhilaration
that an entire community began to feel as they laid claim to a neighborhood
in a way that was unprecedented. What is most remarkable to me is that
the sense of attachment to the valley has been transferred from generation
to generation, from community to community over decades. It seems that
somebody always wants to call that place "home."

The Castro Q and A

It was an unlikely setting for a revolution. A modest San Francisco neighborhood
became, virtually overnight, an icon for a social and political movement.
Filmmaker Peter L. Stein reflects on the making of The Castro,
which traces the dramatic transformation of a quiet, working-class neighborhood
of European immigrants into an international symbol of gay liberation.

Q. Why is this documentary about a neighborhood in San Francisco important
to a national audience?

A. I think that the story of San Francisco's Castro District is one of
the great immigrant stories of our country. The twist is, though, that
these immigrants weren't fleeing distant tyrants or famines, but intolerant
communities and families in their own country. Once they found each other
in the streets of the Castro, they built a culture together, found political
strength, and became part of a movement that was sweeping the nation.
More than any other place, this one neighborhood came to symbolize, for
better or for worse, the growing visibility of a group of people whose
invisibility would have been preferred by much of the country.

Q. You're seeming to claim The Castro is the first gay neighborhood.
How can that be?

A. Oh, even as far back as the 1920s there were certainly neighborhoods
where homosexuals knew they could find each other, not only in San Francisco,
but notably in Greenwich Village in New York. But before the era of the
Castro, so-called "gay neighborhoods" were associated strictly
with nightlife, or vice and prostitution, or at best a kind of Bohemian
attitude that tolerated everybody, not just gays and lesbians. The Castro
was really the first place where gay people set out to plant a rainbow
flag in a neighborhood and stake a claim to it as their turf, where they
could own businesses, buy property, elect their own officials, and walk
down the street as a gay or lesbian person 24 hours a day. This was new.
It was a new way of thinking about being a gay person in America -- not
only could you be visible, you could have a home base, and your strength
could be counted at the polls, at the cash register, in the property tax
rolls. That's a powerful shift for a group of people who never felt they
could be "at home" anywhere.

Nowadays you have neighborhoods in many cities -- West Hollywood, Chicago's
North Halsted Street and Miami's South Beach, for example -- that are
proudly gay-identified -- but the Castro, because it sprang up so fast
and with such notoriety, became a kind of archetype of gay America. It
also became a lightning rod for America's discomfort with so-called "gay
power."

Q. It seems that gay life was not very well recorded until the explosion
of the 1970s. Did that hamper your efforts to tell the story?

A. Gay history is mainly a hidden history until very recently. We are
fortunate in having a local repository, the Gay and Lesbian Historical
Society of Northern California, that has tried to preserve the images
and the ephemera of gay life in this area. But it took a lot of hunting;
my associate producer David Condon and I spoke with some 200 people before
ever rolling a foot of tape. Sometimes we were fortunate in our discoveries:
a visiting out-of-towner happened to find out about our project, and supplied
us with exquisite and poignant home movies of gay life in San Francisco
in the '40s and '50s. And sometimes we lost out: many of the important
storytellers of the Castro, who should by all rights be around to share
their tale, have died in the last 15 years. AIDS casts such an enormous
shadow over the neighborhood.

Q. Were you ever concerned that the tragedy of AIDS would overwhelm
your documentary?

A. AIDS is overwhelming, and it had to be dealt with in the story. But
here again, time and history are funny things -- I don't think I could
have made this documentary even 3 years ago. The neighborhood was still
in the depths of a kind of psychic trauma that couldn't allow for any
perspective on the momentous drama that happened there in the '70s. But
when we began shooting in 1996, it seems that gay men of the generation
who had lived through the nightmare were just beginning to turn the corner
on AIDS -- not simply from a health standpoint, but in a larger sense.
It seems people were beginning to try to make sense of the big picture
-- and to remember with fondness the roller-coaster ride they had been
on. And I think that joy of reminiscence is so important.

Q. A surprising bit of trivia from the documentary is that one of
Tony Bennett's signature songs, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco,"
was written by two gay men. What are some other gems that you uncovered?

A. Yes, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" was written by George
Cory and Douglas Cross, two songwriters from New York who visited the
city in the 1950's and were obviously taken with what they found here.
It turns out that San Francisco in the 1950s was pretty well known as
a friendly town for gays, despite the routine entrapments, harassment
and police raids they suffered.

Another surprise I found-and this is not really trivia at all, but pretty
important-was regarding San Francisco's well developed gay political community
long before the Castro and Harvey Milk. You know, "gay liberation"
is often seen as being born in June 1969, with the riots at New York's
Stonewall Bar. And certainly, that uprising was nationally significant.
But four years earlier in San Francisco, an incident took place on New
Year's Day that put this city's gay and lesbian community on the map.
There was a raid on a gay fundraising event that angered a lot of progressive
heterosexuals (because some of them had been arrested too!), and eventually
a judge threw out all the charges. It didn't have the national impact
that Stonewall did but it helped develop a public awareness in San Francisco
that gays and lesbians should be, to some degree, left unharassed.

And then of course there is the Twin Peaks Bar. In the early 1970s, a
couple of lesbians bought one of the old Irish bars at the corner of Castro
and Market Streets. It was pretty decrepit, dark and quiet. At the time,
the trend in the swinging straight taverns was the "fern bar"
look -- big windows, lots of plants, and a big wooden bar. Well, the women
decided to open a gay men's bar with a similar look, and they installed
enormous plate glass windows fronting Castro Street. It's hard to believe,
but it was the first time that a gay bar had opened itself up so the world
could look inside. That was only 25 years ago. And the bar is still there.

Q. What drew you to the story of the Castro District?

A. I have a rather unusual connection to it, because I am one of those
rare people who didn't immigrate to San Francisco to begin a new life,
but instead was actually born and raised here -- as was my father. We
watched the neighborhood change before our eyes. So as a native, I could
sympathize with the sense of loss that many of the old-timers felt in
seeing their tight-knit community break apart. But just as important,
I'm keenly aware of how transforming the experience of the Castro was
to a whole generation of gay men and women -- the sense of finding their
"people" for the first time. So I had a unique perspective on
the history.

Interestingly, though, when I first moved back to San Francisco as an
adult in the early '80s, I didn't really like the Castro -- I found it
claustrophobic, too homogeneous, and relentlessly sexualized. My women
friends felt invisible there. But after getting to know so many men and
women whose lives were changed by the experience of the neighborhood,
I really came to have a sense of wonder about the history that happened
there. Even with its problems, the Castro is really an extraordinary chapter
in a larger struggle that virtually every American minority has undergone
-- the struggle for identity, survival, and ultimately, acceptance. And
that was a story I wanted to tell.

Q. The documentary brings up some of the problems the neighborhood
has experienced -- not just from neighbors, but from within the gay community.
Is there a lot of criticism about the Castro?

A. Well at first, the very fact that a lot of open homosexuals were claiming
a neighborhood as their "turf" was problematic for many of the
old-timers -- but it's important to point out that on the whole, Eureka
Valleyites have been extremely tolerant of the earth-shaking changes that
swept the neighborhood. Of course, many of them benefited, as they watched
their property values skyrocket in the 1970s and 1980s. But there were
wonderful changes that happened, too -- places like Most Holy Redeemer
Church, which at the outset was very critical of the gay "influx,"
turns out now to be a very progressive, gay-friendly congregation that
turned their old convent into an AIDS hospice.

Within the gay community, women and people of color have always felt
marginalized by the very white, very mainstream, very male world that
the Castro became in the 1970's. And only in the last 10 years has the
gay community begun to address these issues. To this day there are still
no women's bars or hangouts in the Castro.

Q. Where is the neighborhood headed now?

A. There is a lot of trepidation over the growing commercialization of
the Castro. And it's a fascinating parallel with some of the other "signature"
ethnic neighborhoods in the U.S., like San Francisco's Chinatown or Boston's
North End. Parts of those neighborhoods have become Disneyland versions
of themselves, with no relation to the communities they once served. And
as gays and lesbians find that they can live in lots of different places
without fear, the very need for a "gay neighborhood" may in
fact be obsolete. So what's to keep the Castro from becoming just another
yuppie enclave?

But you know, one of the people I interviewed for the show, Sharon Johnson,
told me a wonderful story. She grew up in the neighborhood when it was
Eureka Valley, and she's seen it change a lot. She met a gay taxi driver
in the Castro a little while ago who said, "I've only been here a
couple of months, but somehow, this place feels like home." And Sharon
said, "Well, welcome home." And that's really the spirit of
the place -- it has always opened its arms to newcomers who needed a place
to call home. I hope it never loses that.